It Could Happen Here - Introducing: It Could Happen Here Daily

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Collapse is all around us. Find out what's coming next, and what you can do to build a new world from the ashes of the old, every day on this show. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

By the time the heat waves subsided, at least a thousand people were dead. Those are the official numbers, at least. The numbers no one trusts. The city government and the police denied breaking up homeless encampments during the disaster, and only acknowledged a handful of outdoor exposure deaths. On Twitter, someone shares a video of what might be a mass grave. You're not sure if it's real, and you don't really have time to find out. After the grid overloads, it takes weeks for the power situation to normalize.

Bottled water, abundant at the start of the disaster, becomes scarce. In conversations with friends and snippets of time online, you learn that much of the Midwest has been subject to titanic mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit the southeast, driving up demand for disaster supplies even further, and putting more stress on interstate commerce. Work is basically impossible for days. You're not even really sure if your job's going to exist much longer anyway. Outside of a few high-end shopping districts, life just hasn't gone back to normal for most people. So you've settled into a new normal, using your car and your now copious free time to ferry supplies to and from a handful of collection points and new encampments.

You felt bad for days after fleeing when the cops broke up the first camp. Aaron, your community organizer friend, told you not to worry about it. Not everyone's ready to go face-to-face with riot cops. Tom, the former Marine, said the same thing, but then offered to give you some self-defense training if you wanted it. He and a couple of other combat vets had started organizing regular self-defense sessions in one of the camps, based out of an old apartment complex abandoned when its holding company went bankrupt. For a couple weeks, you lose yourself in the work. Gradually, you realize that the network of encampments you and your new friends have been working to support have become something more than just a stopgap. For one thing, the number

of folks without housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress on the power grid and the questionable ways some people dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires, which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The local economy is in free fall too. You're not the only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It helps that you're spending half your time in one camp or another anyway. You decide your best bet at any kind of comfort in the future is to make sure life in the camps is as comfortable for everyone as possible. To that end, you and Tom scrounge up a crew and spend days flitting in and out of abandoned buildings, scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring.

None of you know much about how to use that shit, but a collective of electricians and engineers put together a list of the parts they needed and how to safely get them. By the time summer comes to an end, almost 3,000 people are living in camps with regular power and cooling stations. Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar stills to filter wastewater and deal with the drinking water shortage that's still endemic across the southern half of the country. Life is, by almost any measure, harder than it was a year ago.

But the stories of wildfires in the Northwest and massive police crackdowns across the Great Lakes region make it clear that you're not struggling alone. You feel lucky that it's been weeks since you've so much as seen a police patrol. There's been a lot more property crime in the parts of town where the economy is still functioning somewhat close to normal. You've heard shootouts several nights, and you've grown increasingly glad to be off on the margins with a good community of people who take care of each other and don't

have much worth stealing. And then, in late September, things take a turn. Some right-wing livestreamer visited the largest of the three camps, now almost 1,500 strong. He stitched together a narrative blaming a series of downtown arsons and burglaries on organized Antifa extremists in their war camp. One of Tom's friends, who's been doing armed security at night, shows you a handful of posts from far-right extremists threatening to raid the camp. You hear rumors the police might finally be planning a crackdown, too. Ever fired a gun? Tom asks. You shake your head no, and he nods. Well, that's probably about

time you learn. I'm Robert Evans, and this has been an excerpt from the continuation of my podcast It Could Happen Here, which is now a daily series. Listen to It Could Happen Here daily, starting on August 16th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.